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Abstract
This article describes a typology for formal governance structures of public transit in the United States to support inquiry into how organizational structures influence policy making processes, organizational capacity and policy outcomes. Scholarship of public transit has largely explored outcome-based research while paying less attention to how decisions are made. Despite some transport scholarship that shows how institutional characteristics influence financing, power arrangements and public discourse, there has been little recent analysis of governance within public transit systems beyond the regional role of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs). Using data from multiple sources, we assembled a database of governance structure of transit systems in the largest 40 cities in the United States. We show that the structure of transit decision making has substantial variance across and within cities, and is far from limited to MPOs. The variety of governance models and growth of local and sub-local models suggest that local context is critical for better understanding transit priorities and decision-making processes.
Highlights
The planning and provision of public transit systems is a complex and contentious process that is governed through a variety of overlapping strategies and actors
In the paper that follows, we develop a typology for governance structures of public transit in the United States to support further inquiry into how organizational structures influence policy making processes, organizational capacity and policy outcomes
Rather than impose normative views about the appropriate level of decision making across all contexts, the typology described in this paper aims to support inquiry into the decision-making behavior of local and regional stakeholders to better understand the politics of goal setting, policy adoption and implementation strategies in public transit
Summary
The planning and provision of public transit systems is a complex and contentious process that is governed through a variety of overlapping strategies and actors. New trends including the rise of Technology Network Companies (TNCs), localized financing and global pandemics have made apparent the limits of existing governance systems. As public transit agencies struggle to adjust to changing circumstances and new competition, the strategies available to them are shaped considerably by the formal governance structures that guide decision-making processes, define responsibilities and shape organizational capacity. Scholarship on public transit has primarily focused on the technical and operational factors rather than the decision-making processes that support, hinder and shape implementation of these factors. One of the major constraints on research is the lack of information about the formal decision-making structures of transit provider organizations. While the United States’ National Transit Database (NTD)
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